The U.S. military’s cost estimate to build a pier off Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid has risen to $320 million, a U.S. defense official and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The figure, which has not been previously reported, illustrates the massive scale of a construction effort that the Pentagon has said involves about 1,000 U.S. service members, mostly from the Army and Navy.
Still, the cost has roughly doubled from initial estimates earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“The cost has not just risen. It has exploded,” Senator Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee, told Reuters, when asked about the costs.
Republicans are all for sending weapons at any cost, but line itemize humanitarian aid. Fucking monsters. Maybe they should just pay it out of Israel’s $26B aid package.
I’ve got a great cost-saving idea!
Withhold all aid from Israel until they start allowing serious amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza!
Boom! 320 million saved, AND a far greater amount of aid reaches Palestinians! Win-win!
Yeah. I wish there was the support available for that.
That doesn’t seem to include the cost of mobilizing 10 US Naval Vessels, the cost of the aid distributed itself, or the cost of the servicemen’s salaries.
That said, I don’t really a give a fuck, you know? Like, why would we care? We need to do it, we’re going to do it no matter the cost.
No we don’t. There is 0 reason to build a humanitarian relief pier in Gaza. Most of Gaza’s border is our “close ally” in this conflict. The other border is willing to aid to pass through their territory. Both countries are advanced, and have more than enough logistical infastructure to facilitate all the aid transfers that are nessasary.
The land corridor is more than capable of facilitating aid deliveries. The pier is a PR stunt to make it look like we are working on the problem.
Israel has been making military targets of aid distribution through land routes. If that were an effective method then there wouldn’t be hundreds of thousands if not millions of starving Palestinians, and then we wouldn’t need to send the naval vessels.
Your comment reeks of ignorance of the state of the world.
There is a simple method of solving that problem, just have US military vehicles in the convoys with orders to return fire at everything shooting at them.
How is mobilizing US Military land vehicles across the middle east any logistically different than sending 10 naval vessels? If anything that would be more costly. Plus, they’ll just get caught up at the checkpoints set up by Israeli military the same as the other convoys. Because, generally, starting gunfights is frowned upon, so instead they fall back on beaurocracy.
I’m aware of that. What I’m not aware of is how a pier helps. Israel has not conducted strikes in Egypt, or in Israel, so Israeli strikes are not a reason to have aid avoid either of those countries. The Israeli strikes have hit aid groups traveling within Gaza. It doesn’t matter if aid gets to gaza at a land border, or an sea border. It still needs to be transported within Gaza, so it still has all of the same problems.
If Israel makes military targets of the US Navy then that’s going to be real “fuck around and find out” territory. Helping from afar was inadequate, so now we’re going to be helping in person.
Honestly, it doesn’t sound all that expensive. But they need to just up, or they won’t be anyone left to feed.
